When guests are waiting for transportation, such as a bus, to arrive to transfer them to a meeting, convention, venue, etc., the amount of time one perceives they have been waiting is always much longer than the time they have been actually waiting. Part of the reason for this is the anxiety of the uncertainty of the arrival time for the next bus. Meeting planners regularly get complaints that someone has been waiting for 20-30 minutes for a bus when it can be documented after the fact that buses arrived in no longer than 10-minute intervals.
Meeting planners of events such as a conference, meeting, convention, incentive trip, etc., want to be able to know where their VIP's are over the course of an event, including while they are in vehicles provided by the event. This goal is complicated by the fact that drivers are no longer allowed to use their cell phones while in motion, making it harder to learn the location of vehicles. Meeting planners want to know where vehicles are located when guests are arriving at a destination from the departure location, such as arriving at a hotel from the airport, so they can be greeted upon arrival. They also want to know of traffic situations that would delay a passenger or group of passenger's arrival.
For example, a common industry practice is that meeting planners want to greet their VIP's upon their arrival at the hotel from the airport. This has led to an industry practice known as the “10 minute call out”. Historically, the driver would call when they were 10 minutes from the hotel, if they remembered to do so. Now that drivers are often not allowed to use their phones when driving, meeting planners are reduced to having the driver call before they leave their departure location, which is not optimal because it significantly increases the window of time in which they might arrive at their destination location. The reason that this is a problem is that it is imperative that the VIP greeting is not missed. However, in order to be sure they don't miss the VIP arrival, meeting planners often end up waiting at the destination for more time than necessary, taking them away from other pressing issues. One alternative to address this problem is to make multiple calls into the transportation providers dispatch office to determine when the vehicle's global positioning service (“GPS”) shows it is 10 minutes away.
API stands for Application Programming Interface (API) and it is the language of applications. It's a software-to-software interface that allow for separate parties to talk to each other without any previous user knowledge or intervention. It runs the processes behind the scenes. For example, many online stores use these to allow you to enter credit card information, and then the store uses the API to send the information to a remote application that will verify whether or not the information is correct. API and the adjoining services are invisible to site users and software users. Their jobs run in the background providing a way for applications to work simultaneously.
Meeting planners often use multiple transportation companies when booking transportation for events. This adds a level of complexity when trying to determine where vehicles are located and when passengers will be arriving. While some (certainly not most) transportation providers have the ability to offer meeting planners a link to their company location tracking data, there is a need for method to tie multiple providers together onto one location map via API integration, allowing the meeting planner to view the location of all of their expected passengers in real-time. Rather than logging in to multiple APIs provided by the disparate transportation company data stores, there is a need to log into and view data from disparate transportation company data stores in one convenient and easy to follow format such as through an API, website or computer software program.